The Resurrected Refrigerator

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a fringe of frost in my frost-free freezer. Concerning, yes, but not an obvious situation until a few days later, when the bacon in the fresh-food compartment—you know, the big one—in my refrigerator felt wigglier than it should have. I felt around and the walls felt warm. So I got a thermometer, and found that the temperature in that compartment was about 60 F. when it should have been 40.

Damn.

A refrigerator should not be a cool fall day inside its fresh-food compartment when it ought to be a warmish winter day. I had nightmare visions of new refrigerators costing hundreds of dollars and, far worse, the hassle of arranging for the new refrigerator to arrive. Somehow, they've got it arranged so that spending hundreds of dollars doesn't put you in the driver's seat. No, it makes you a supplicant—they tell you when they'll be pleased to arrive, and it's in a huge swathe of the day, "between 10 and 4," that sort of thing. If you don't want your food to rot, you'll jolly well sit home and wait for them. Getting a repair person to your house is a similar hassle and you don't know what you'll have to pay. There are not many other options.

Every single one of my friends told me to get a new refrigerator. But something in me clung to hope. I didn't want to spend the money or the time. So I did some frantic googling, not knowing what exactly to hope for. I had no expectation of a Christmas miracle in which my refrigerator would be resurrected from the dead. But I fixed my own dryer a couple of years ago after it stopped getting hot, and I thought I would at least make an effort here. So, after a moderate amount of googling, I find instructions on replacing parts and a decision tree about what to replace in what situation. Fair enough. Then I get the model number of a plate in the warm and balmy fresh-food compartment and googled again. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a page about how this particular model of Kenmore Coldspot tends to do this thing where it dribbles water under the vegetable bins. And I thought, *my* refrigerator does that exact thing! And it turned out it does that because some condensation drainage thingy gets clogged with ice. Eventually it conks out the fresh-food bit. This guy told you how to basically strip everything down to expose the clogged area and unfreeze it with a blow-dryer.

I had no blow dryer. But I did have an idea. We were expecting a 36-hour cold snap where the outdoor temperature wouldn't go above freezing. So I put all my frozen food, all the spaghetti sauce from that summer's tomatoes, the venison donated by hunter friends, and just regular food that I didn't want to lose and I put it all in the shed out back. Then I pulled the refrigerator out of its little alcove, unplugged it, propped the doors open, and waited.

The next afternoon, there was a bunch of water in the bottom of the refrigerator. The water, I assumed and hoped, came from the drain, like the guy said. I mopped it up and turned the refrigerator back on with faith in my heart. An hour or two later, the temperature in the fresh-food compartment had fallen to 40 F. and stayed there, right where it ought to have been. The temperature in the freezer was freezing. It was like the refrigerator, in a coma two days before, was now sitting up in its bed and joking with the nurses. A miracle recovery, in other words.

That was a week or so ago, and I'm still marveling. To be sure, a refrigerator is not the same as a pet, or a friend, or a family member or other creature you care about. But the imminent death of an appliance is still a bona fide problem. It's especially a problem if you don't enjoy wasting money or having burly strangers wrestle large objects in and out of your house. And to solve any substantial problem simply by an act of unpluggage—well, it's something, isn't it? It's quite rare. It's not the same order of miracle as nature reawakening each spring, or a comatose person sitting up one day and asking what happened, completely recovered. I think we feel a certain reverence and awe when things like that happen, like we've seen a miracle occur. I know a refrigerator is a mere mechanical object. But everyone wrote it off, and with a day's rest it was perfectly cured. Rationally, I know it's simple luck that someone suggested thawing as a solution, and it worked. But just a little, it feels like a mini-miracle, something to shake your head over, like when a nickel falls on its edge and stays upright. Is it wrong and bad to think your refrigerator was cured by a miracle, a tiny little one anyway, if that's how you happen to feel?